The popularity of pregnancy never seems to end. (Online, we mean.)
Here are last week's top 20 pregnancy-related queries -- with their percentage of all searches among these top 20.
25.3% Pregnancy
23.2% Abortion
12.9% Baby names
6.8% Birth control
5.6% Teen pregnancy
4.8% Baby shower
4.7% Adoption
4.3% RU-486
3.2% Baby gifts
1.4% Childbirth
1.3% Getting pregnant
1.2% Ultrasounds
1.0% Baby clothes
0.9% Baby products
0.8% Pregnancy pictures
0.8% Amniocentesis
0.7% Ectopic pregnancy
0.4% Home pregnancy tests
0.4% Birth defects
0.3% Pregnancy after 40
Baby names is still our favorite entry on this list. At one time they were even on the Lycos 50, before we realized that baby names are popular every week.
Baby names aside, the top of this list shows a certain ambivalence about pregnancy. Abortion (#2), birth control (#4), teen pregnancy (#5) and the abortion pill RU-486 (#8) all make the top 10. Is it possible that people turn to the Web most when they're worried about pregnancy or want to prevent it? It's possible.
But at least half of the abortion queries, we suspect, are students doing school reports. We see big surges in controversial topics like abortion, gun control and capital punishment whenever school is in session.
It's also surprising to note that nearly 5% of all pregnancy-related searches are for baby showers. More than half of those queries, incidentally, were for something odd: baby shower games.
At the lower rank of the list we see more interest in medical specifics: amniocentesis, ultrasounds, ectopic pregnancies and the like. For more about those topics, may we suggest WebMD's big pregnancy guide? Thank you.
